Brain Advance Access published March 14, 2012

doi:10.1093/brain/aws063

Brain 2012: Page 1 of 6

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BRAIN
A JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY

BOOK REVIEW

More than a brain: human mindscapes

In vain we force the living into this or that one of our moulds.
All the moulds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid,
for what we try to put into them
(Henri-Louis Bergson, 1998 [1911], p. x)

LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND,

By J.F. Hoffecker 2011.
New York: Columbia
University Press,
Price: 34.50/$50.00,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14704-0

mean that Darwin might also be wrong? Although neither book

suggests an abandonment of Darwins insights on the cognitive
continuity between humans and animals, they certainly call for
extra care in their application. The image of humans that emerges
is that of a hybrid bio-cultural species which oddly combines two
irreducible and inseparably linked aspects of being, one natural
(the product of biological evolution), the other artificial (an artefact of our own making). In this sense humans lead conflicted
lives (Hoffecker, p. 171); that is, lives rooted in the natural world

The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved.
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What is it to be human? There is a growing tendency nowadays

to think that we are, rather than simply, have, a brain. Why is
that? It appears that the image of the active brain becomes the
new metaphor for the mind. There is nothing inherently wrong
about metaphors. The history of human thought is full of them.
Nonetheless, they can form all pervasive epistemological barriers
when mistaken for the way the world necessarily is. I take it that
no sensible person would deny the fact that we also are, or at
least have a body embedded in the world. Although one could
argue that our plastic brains may have the tendency to become
who we are, there seems to be little doubtat least from an
anthropological perspectivethat we remain, and always have
been, more than our brains. Still, the allure of the brain image is
hard to resist. What are we then? In Landscape of the Mind and
Aping Mankind we are offered much to think about, and even
more to doubt, concerning our current wisdom and entrenched
assumptions about the evolution and whereabouts of the human
mind. Here I cannot hope to engage with everything that is
worthy of discussion in these rich and provocative treatments. I
shall content myself with exploring and assessing a few central
threads in their arguments and the implications that each has for
the way we think about thinking, and about how we come to
think that way.
It helps to start with the commonplaceDarwinian evolution.
Both books agree that so far as our basic biological endowment is
concerned, we are evolved creatures. Like any other animal on this
planet Homo sapiens came into being by the same process of
adaptation and natural selection. Darwin is right. Yet, contrary
to all other animals, with us things did not stop there. For
humans became the only species that successfully and persistently
managed to transcend, or better to transform, its biology into
something new. This idea of becoming human by forming a distinctive collective cognitive realm in a manner not approached by
other animals comes very naturally to us, and it seems rather important, but it is also extremely puzzling: how did we humans get
to be so different? Above all, how different is different? Does this

APING MANKIND,
By R. Tallis 2011.
Durham: Acumen,
Price: 25.00 (Hardcover),
ISBN: 9781844652723

| Brain 2012: Page 2 of 6

different: we are explicit creatures who do things deliberately

and self-consciously. Humans, contrary to all other animals, actively lead rather than passively act out our lives according to the
rules of a predetermined genetic script (p. 151, ch.4; ch.6).
It would be fair to say that, to a certain extent, Hoffecker and
Tallis share a great deal in their conviction on the historical and
collective qualities of human consciousness. Nonetheless, Tallis
devastating critique of Darwinised Neuromania turns against
the information processing and representational foundation that
supports Hoffeckers main thesis. It is hardly surprising then that
the two books, which could have otherwise nicely complemented
one another, turn out to share very little. I will argue that important lessons can be learned by exploring some genuine incompatibilities between the two books. To do this, I shall look at
Hoffeckers idea of the super-brain. In particular, considerations
that emerge from this discussion can be used as a springboard for
examining a number of central themes relevant to the broader
implications of Tallis critique.

Brain-bounded
Hoffeckers conception of the human cognitive realm can be
defined by way of the notion of the super-brain. All major
aspects of human psychology appear somehow linked to this
notion in one way or another. What then is this super-brain? If
just another name for the way our big brain has been expanding
to accommodate the complex array of information needed to operate the computational engine that Hoffecker places at the heart
of our mindscape, little is changed or added to the conventional
neo-evolutionary story. If, on the other hand, it has a different
sense, then we need to spell out what it is. Hoffecker does not
provide much by way of a concise definition of the super-brain.
Thus, it is for the reader to do the final sorting out and discovery,
chapter after chapter, of the different aspects and layers of its
meaning. Here is the general idea as I see it:
Think of honeybee colonies and the way they seem to gather,
share and process information about their environment as a group.
The concept of the super-brain is analogous to the image of such
an elementary super-organism where multiple individuals perform
functions normally confined to a single organism (p. 75). The
difference in the case of humans is in the sheer amount of information shared, stored and passed from one generation to the
next. How did this vast capacity for information processing
came about? Although the growth in Homo brain size must
have conferred significant advances to the organizing, storing
and manipulating of that information, it was not the key to the
super-brain. Instead, Hoffecker argues, it was the advent of language that provided the basis for the super-brain marking the
threshold of modernity (p. 76). But what might be the underlying
process that makes possible this major transformation in the
cognitive biography of our species? As we read in Chapter 5 the
evolution of language brought about a revolution in the human
ability for symbolic communication. On the one hand, language
allowed humans drastically to increase the computational and
recursive power of their brains; and on the other, it provided

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and yet quite different from it. The two books certainly appear to
be in agreement on that. Nonetheless, their paths diverge when it
comes to explaining the nature of the distinctive realm that was
formed out of this ongoing conflict: what is this new kind of
realm; what is it made of; where is it to be found; how did it
come about; and how does it fit into the Darwinian picture? It is
those questions mainly that I propose to consider.
Landscape of the Mind is a book written by an archaeologist
who aims at examining the long-term material dimensions of how
we have come to participate in the phenomenon of the mind.
Starting with the early bifacial stone tools of the Lower
Palaeolithic, some 1.7 million years ago, John Hoffecker sets out
to explore how humans effective use of ever more refined forms
of artefacts and technologies provided a medium to externalize
their minds and redesign themselves. In order to understand life
and human evolution, Richard Dawkins argued in The Blind
Watchmaker (1988) that we should think of information technology. This is precisely what Hoffecker does: modern humans are
the product of information, rather than genes (or, because genes
are themselves a form of information, an alternative and more
mutable type of information) (p. 84). Guided by the old computational ideal of cognition as the manipulation of internal representations, Hoffecker looks at humans, first and above all, as
information animalsthat is, animals unique in their abilities to
combine, translate and externalize by way of phenotypes the
coded information stored in vast neural networks of their evolved
super-brain. For Hoffecker the distinctive feature of human
cognitive evolution is the unprecedented complexity of the
human super-brain that enabled the generation and accumulation, over the course of countless generations, of a potentially
infinite variety of hierarchically organized structures of information
in various media.
Aping Mankind, on the other hand, is a critical treatment written with a different, far more radical, objective in mind. Raymond
Talliss aim as a neuroscientist and philosopher is to expose and
demolish the Darwinian-inspired intellectual syndromes of
Darwinitis and neuromania (or else Darwinised Neuromania),
i.e. the tendency to explain everything about human life in terms
of biological evolution and the brain. For Tallis, biology and
evolutionary theory are only part of the story of human transformation. To claim otherwise is to turn healthy Darwinism to
unhealthy Darwinitis: being a good Darwinian does not require
succumbing to Darwinitis or denying that we areprofoundly
different (p. 229). By the same token, for Tallis, a neural account
of consciousness is a contradiction in terms (emphasis added,
p. 94). Human consciousness cannot be found solely in the
stand-alone brain; or even just in brain; or even just in a brain
in a body; or even in a brain interacting with other brains in
bodies. It participates in, and is part of, a community of minds
built up by conscious human beings over hundreds of thousand
years (p. 11). How then are we to proceed with our quest to
understand the uniqueness of human mind? After a long journey
dismantling much of the neo-evolutionary computational foundation that Hoffecker takes for granted in his book, Tallis seeks
refuge in the notion of human intentionality. It is the property
of aboutness that offers the key to understanding what it is that
makes us human beings and how we humans come to be so

Book Review

Book Review

Redesigning humans: getting thoughts

out of our heads
Overall, I am in full agreement with Hoffeckers emphasis on the
important role of technology and material culture in human enhancement and alteration. The idea of looking at the built environment as a form of self-engineering and transformation lies at
the heart of cognitive archaeology in general (Donald, 1991;
Knappett, 2005; Gamble, 2007; Renfrew, 2007; Boivin, 2008;
Gosden, 2008; Read and van der Leeuw, 2008; Stout et al.,
2008; Wynn and Coolidge, 2008) and of material engagement
theory (MET) in particular (Malafouris, 2004; Renfrew, 2006;
Malafouris and Renfrew, 2010). Moreover, it is an idea that has
recently attracted a great deal of attention outside archaeology in
areas like niche construction theory (Laland et al., 2001; Sterenly,
2004; Stotz, 2010) and embodied cognitive science (van Gelder,
1995; Clark, 1997, 2003; Wheeler, 2005; Menary, 2007; Wheeler
and Clark, 2008; Chemero, 2009; Hutchins, 2010). As the philosopher Andy Clark neatly summarizes in his Supersizing the
Mind: In building our physical and social worlds, we build

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(or rather, we massively reconfigure) our minds and our capacities

of thought and reason (2008, p. xxviii).
Unfortunately, and rather disappointingly, however, Hoffeckers
decision to use computational cognitivism as his guiding intuition
about the human mind leaves much to be desired. My own
critique of the representational or computational view of mind,
defended at much greater length elsewhere (Malafouris, 2004,
2008a, 2010b), is that it reiterates the internalist myth that invites us to think that the cognitive life and efficacy of things are
those of a disembodied digit of information written somehow on
the neural tissue by way of representation. Despite Hoffeckers
efforts to convince the reader of his broader concept that the
super-brain is a collective mind or consciousness, he never escapes the artificial and largely Cartesian divisions between an
inner and outer realm of human experience. The promised
Landscape of Mind turns out to be more of a disembodied
Brainscape. The embodiment of thought is implicitly denied or
simply neglected. Hoffeckers super-brain has very few human
characteristics. Rather, it resembles the image of the information
handling and storing super-computer out of which it actually derives. The human individual is essentially defined as the sum of an
immense mass of integrated memories and knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of experience (p. 84) deposited in the
enlarged intracranial storehouse of memory. This is too narrow a
conception properly to accommodate and account for the cognitive coupling processes occurring between cognition and material
culture. Additionally, Hoffeckers understanding of externalization
and technology as the imposition of form looks to me extremely
problematic and outdated in the light of contemporary understanding of material culture (Ingold, 1998, 2010; Latour, 1999;
Gosden, 2005; Knappett and Malafouris, 2008; Malafouris,
2008b, 2010a; Webmoor and Witmore, 2008; Bjrnar, 2010;
Hicks and Beaudry, 2010; Malafouris and Renfrew, 2010b;
Hodder, 2011; Knappett, 2011). Paradoxically, although he
refers to Heideggers revealing (p. 25) power of technology, he
fails to incorporate the most essential aspect of Heideggers view:
the absence of inside and outside (Ingold, 2008). Indeed, many
times in the book, the reader gets the impression that Hoffecker
struggles with the artificial boundaries that his own model has
created. A particularly telling example can be seen in his discussion
of the collective mind of Upper Palaeolithic societies where he
refers to modified pieces of organic and inorganic material as
being literally part of the mind, remnants of hierarchically structured thought that existed (and still exists!) outside individual
human brains (p. 108). There is an obvious hint to the spirit of
active externalism and extended cognition, which unfortunately
never becomes explicit or is given the room and opportunity to
grow. Instead, we are left with a series of, I admit, intriguing
metaphors and analogies: clothing is artificial skin, bows are engines, spear-throwers are elongated arms, traps are artificial
life, and domesticated dogs are biotechnology. I found this
aspect of Hoffeckers treatment truly innovative. Unfortunately,
as with the rest of the book, the lack of theoretical sophistication
and analytical depth offer the reader no means or guidance about
how precisely to interpret and contextualize these metaphors of
mind. I cannot help but feel that there is something of a missed
opportunity here. The disembodied information processing model

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the means whereby members of each group could integrate their

brains.
This brings us to another distinctive characteristic of Hoffeckers
super-brain, the idea of externalization. As mentioned, for
Hoffecker, human thinking is based on the processing and communication of information that is coded symbolically in the brain.
Although other animals seem able to communicate simple bits of
information, humans appear to be unique in one important respect: they are able to project their thought structures and internal
mental representations outside the brain. The hand and the vocal
tract are, as Hoffecker points out, the earliest human organs
evolved to serve that purpose (that is, to communicate or externalize mental representations). The first recognizable archaeological examples of the externalization of human thought appear
in the form of bifacial tools that exhibit a mental template
imposed on rock (p. 4). As with language, the development of
technology provided another powerful medium for the externalization of thought and creative symbolic expression with profound
consequences for humanity. In particular, humans have redesigned the environment, both abiotic and biotic, in ways that
have completely altered their relationship to it as organic beings
(p. 7). The transfer of information through oral tradition and material culture enabled the super-brain to escape the narrow confines of biological time and thus the formation of collective
consciousness or mind. Hoffeckers collective mind can be seen
as the accumulation and movement of thought, from one brain
to others, which through time acquired a potentially unlimited
lifespan of its own (p. 139). The super-brain transcends, in
other words, biological space (the individual brain), and time (the
life of the individual: see pp. 16 and 171): although
the super-brain is composed of a group of individual brains that
are the products of evolutionary biology, it exhibits properties that
are unknown or had not been evident in organic evolution
(p. 77). So what do we make of all this?

Brain 2012: Page 3 of 6

| Brain 2012: Page 4 of 6

Bewitched by language
I end with some brief comments on Talliss critique of neuromania
and Darwinitis. Needless to say I fully endorse Talliss
thought-provoking arguments against neuronal reductionism
and of the humanities-turned-animalities (p. 278). One of the
great strengths of Talliss book lies in revealing how
neuro-evolutionary ideas are now woven into the very language
in which we are invited to think about ourselves (p. 182). Tallis is
right to insist that Darwinian accounts are far from being the last
word on what we are. Unconscious natural selection can no more
explain how consciousness could have come into being, than can
humans be seen as parts of nature in the same way that are other
animals (p. 11). In many important ways we are as remote from
animals when we queue for tickets for a pop concert as when we
write a sublime symphony (p. 151). It does not seem correct,
however, to insist, as Tallis seems to imply, that in itself the recognition that we are fundamentally different from animals carries
with it some special epistemic status. When it comes to explaining
the human condition, emphasizing difference instead of similarity
does not necessarily bring you closer to the truth of the matter.
When is neuroscience turned into neuromania; when does
Darwinism become Darwinitis? The book is not always clear on
these important questions. To give one example, Tallis recognizes
that Darwin himself reached at the edge of Darwinitis (p. 154)
but clarifies that he never crossed the line: I cannot emphasize too

strongly that I have no quarrel with Darwinism; and if I did,

I would be wasting my time and yours (p. 209). How then are
we to make sense of Darwins famous claim that the difference in
mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind (Darwin, 1871, p. 105)?
Maybe, as Tallis correctly observes: we are held captive by a
picture of ourselves from which we cannot escape because it is
written into the very language in which we think about our
nature (p. 184). But language, I think, bewitches us allthat
includes Tallis, Wittgenstein, and the author of this reviewnot
simply some of us. Talliss extraordinary treatment has some
dangerous ideas of its own and is part of the same language
game; nothing written about human evolution can ever be outside
this game.
In another important sense, to fully understand this book one
needs to understand Talliss frustration. He describes himself using
the example of a man bouncing up from the table, his mouth full
of bread and cheese, saying that he meant to stand no more
blasted nonsense (p. 8). I also think that this frustration, reaching
dangerous levels, as Tallis confesses, often becomes a weakness.
Many times Talliss rhetoric appears crude and suffers from the
same over-simplification, exaggeration and over-statement that he
ascribes to those so-called pseudo-scientists he is attacking:
personally it strikes me as conceptually unsatisfying (not to mention morally suspect) to suppose that one can ever effectively fight
the absurdly reductionist nature of scientism, biologism, neuromania, Darwinitis or any other modern intellectual syndrome by
employing similar means. This is by no means to say, however,
that Tallis treatment lacks in depth and philosophical insight when
it comes to deal with hard questions about consciousness and
exposing the conceptual shortcomings of evolutionary theory and
neurocentrism. But if we are truly to assess the claim that what
really matters about human thinking, self and consciousness boils
down to neural activity, then a more cautious, and I propose
interdisciplinary, strategy is needed. In this battle against scientism,
Tallis does a fine job in selecting, knowing and engaging his enemies but he hardly bothers to mention, not to say recruit, his
possible allies. It is only in the last chapter of his book that we
learn, albeit in brief, that there are still some philosophers who
continue to resist and question the authority of the neuroimage
rather than succumbing to it. I believe there are more thinkers of
this sort than Tallis is recognizing. I also think that maybe the
biggest weakness of his otherwise brilliant critique is that it
failsneglects evento engage and capitalize on this wealth of
philosophical, anthropological, not to say neuroscientific ideas.
We read almost nothing about growing literature on the ethical, social and legal consequences of neuroscientific knowledge and its applications (e.g. Farah, 2004; Garland, 2004;
Marcus, 2004; Illes, 2005; Rose, 2007; Chiao, 2009; Vidal,
2009). Importantly, the rapidly developing fields of critical neuroscience (Choudhury et al., 2009, 2011; Slaby, 2010) are also
missing.
Tallis has every reason to be extremely sceptical of most interdisciplinary exchanges at the interface between humanities and
neurosciences. Many times the prefix neuro- or evolutionary
can be subjected to his critique as illustrated with many examples.

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upon which Hoffecker grounds his archaeology of mind simply

does not do justice to the complexity and enactive character of
human cognitive lives which largely take place outside our heads
(e.g. Clark, 2008; Noe, 2009).
Talliss Aping Mankind on the other hand, does an excellent
job in exposing the various pitfalls behind the idea, prevalent in
the circles of evolutionary psychology, of the human mind as an
immense mass of information that has been accumulating since
the early Upper Palaeolithic (p. 16). Indeed, Darwinised
Neuromania as he characteristically observes feeds on a diet of
information (p. 191). Moreover, Tallis challenges the idea
that the world is somehow represented or encoded in the
brain:
Representationre-presentationmeans
presentation
again. There can be no representation without prior presentation . . . .representation is something that happens within the
world of phenomena; it cannot be that in virtue of which here
are phenomena (appearings) (p. 191). But what about material
culture? Tallis appears to recognize the importance of the material
world we have created, what he calls artefactscape (p. 152), but
he fails to recognize the centrality of material engagement in the
larger picture of humanity. Although Tallis correctly identifies the
mereological fallacy of treating the part as if it were the whole
(p. 184) when it comes to speaking of the brain as if we were
referring to the individual person, he fails to recognize that a similar fallacy is operating when we treat the mind as the property of
the individual. That is, the fallacy of attributing to the individual
cognitive properties that belong to the larger distributed system of
cultural practices (Hutchins, 2008).

Book Review

Book Review

Lambros Malafouris
Keble College, University of Oxford
E-mail: lambros.malafouris@keble.ox.ac.uk

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Still not all neuro-prefixed disciplines are necessarily about displacing humanities. Interdisciplinary synergies that are rooted in a
radically different symmetrical epistemological foundation do
exist. Unfortunately, Tallis either fails to detect or altogether
choses to ignore examples of these coalitions in his book. To
give one characteristic example from personal experience, the
new field of neuroarchaeology (for a detailed manifesto see
Malafouris, 2009, 2010b; Renfrew et al., 2009) not only has
repeatedly and explicitly argued against any form of neural reductionism and neo-evolutionism, but also builds on the recently formulated frameworks of dynamical, embodied, extended,
distributed and situated cognition (DEEDS) that Tallis only briefly,
and rather superficially, discusses at the end of his book (p. 352).
In short, neuroarchaeology sets out to meet the epistemological
challenge of developing common relational ways of interpreting
the complex interactions between brainbodyworld moving away
from the idea of the isolated internal mind and the demarcated
external material world towards their mutual constitution as an
inseparable analytic unit.
For the above reasons, although I can understand Talliss anxiety about the future of humanities, I do not share his pessimism.
Above all, I certainly disagree with his unproductive predisposition
against interdisciplinary research. If humanities, arts and social sciences are to reassert the autonomy of their disciplines then disciplinary closure is not an option. To the contrary, true disciplinary
autonomy and authority can only come when deeply entrenched
axiomatic assumptions of each discipline are put under constant
interdisciplinary scrutiny and critical rethinking. The key problem is
not in the compartmentalization of mind in the brain, but instead
in the compartmentalization of mind sciences and humanities.
Taking Tallis seriously, for me, implies a deeper level of disciplinary
engagement, what I call hard interdisciplinarity, that would lead
to the adoption of a different set of epistemological valuesnot
axiomswhich in turn would transform how we think about the
human mind. As Tallis rightly observes, to seek the fabric of contemporary humanity inside the brain is as mistaken as to try detecting the sound of a gust passing through a billion-leaved wood
by applying a stethoscope to isolated seeds (p. 11). But surely,
the recognition that the mind is not restricted to the brain within
the skull, does not mean that understanding the activity within
that brain is not crucial. The real question then becomes how
we give the brain its due without falling into the trap of sterile
biologism and neurocentrism. This leaves us, I think, with an
important epistemological challenge of developing common relational ways of thinking about the mind as a bio-cultural process.
The contribution of cognitive archaeology, I suggest, is to provide
a focus on the interaction between cognition and material culture
and the mutual constitution of brain, body and culture beyond
skin and across the scales of time.

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| Brain 2012: Page 6 of 6

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